Donald Trump is steaming over what he considered to be a “gotcha” question–but Carly Fiorina stepped up and knocked the question out of the park.
On an interview about foreign policy with Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, the Republican frontrunner was asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt about General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s “Quds forces,” and how the Iranian nuclear deal would affect Iran’s military strength.
Trump began talking about the Kurds, the ethnic minority in northern Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey instead–before Hewitt stepped in to correct him.
“Oh,” Trump replied. “I thought you said Kurds” instead of Quds.
He later slammed the conservative radio host, calling him “third-rate.”
“Well, that is a gotcha question, though,” Trump later said. “I will be so good at the military, your head will spin. But obviously, I’m not meeting these people. I’m not seeing these people… it sounded like gotcha. You’re asking me names that, I think it’s somewhat ridiculous, but that’s okay.”
Fiorina, however, when asked a similar question during her own interview with Hewitt–and had a very different response.
“We know that the general of the Quds force has been a powerful tool of the Iranian regime to sow conflict,” she explained to Hewitt. “The Iranian deal – which sadly, has just been approved by Congress – starts a massive flow of money, and that money is going to be used not only to build up an Iranian nuclear weapon – which they have been hell-bent on getting for thirty years – that money is also going to go to the Quds forces, going to go Hezbollah. It’s going to go to all of Iran’s proxies, which is why I’ve said to you on other occasions, Hugh, that we have to stop the money flow.”
While Fiorina agreed that, like Trump, she also “can get confused a bit between the name and group because they sound a bit alike,” she defend Hewitt for asking the question in the first place.
“I don’t think they’re ‘gotcha questions’ at all,” she said. “The questions you’re asking are at the heart of the threat that we face, that our ally, Israel, faces, that the world faces. It is critically important that America lead again in the world. It is critically important that we have a leader in the White House who understands the world and who’s in it and how it works.”
